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FEATURE

Dr. James Hansen, who was the lead climate scientist at NASA, and sixteen other top scientists have concluded the Greenland and Antarctic glaciers will melt ten times faster than previous estimates, leading to sea level rise of ten or more feet in as little as 50 years.

In their newly released study: "Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 ◦C global warming could be dangerous," the scientists warn that "Amplifying feedbacks in the Southern Ocean and atmosphere contribute to dramatic climate change in our simulations."

We conclude that continued high emissions will make multi-meter sea level rise practically unavoidable and likely to occur this century. Social disruption and economic consequences of such large sea level rise could be devastating. It is not difficult to imagine that conflicts arising from forced migrations and economic collapse might make the planet ungovernable, threatening the fabric of civilization.

They are describing an ocean feedback loop near Antarctica that results in cooler freshwater from melting glaciers forcing warmer, saltier water underneath the ice sheets, speeding up the melting rate.

FEATURE

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FEATURE

The history of why Hamilton and Adams put the Electoral College in the Constitution tells a different story than is generally known. While the number of senators per state was established to offset the popular vote, the Electoral College was created as a compromise during the Constitutional Congress because southern states had smaller populations of eligible voters than the northern states.

This was because a large percentage of the southern states' populations were slaves.

The northern states did not have slavery. The working class in the industrial North could vote. The concern of the slave states was that they wouldn't be represented, so a compromise was made called the Electoral Collage where the representation would be made on assigned electors, and not on eligible voting population.

This gave the slave states equal representation to the Northern States even though a large percentage of their population could not vote. Hamilton and Adams agreed to this to get the Southern States to vote to ratify the Constitution.

Dr. James Hansen has published, with sixteen renowned scientists from around the world, the direst warning about climate change, ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms to date. We have published the abstract from the paper and have provided a link to the full study.

The warning from the paper cannot be over-emphasized. Sea level rise is real, it's highly dangerous, and must not be ignored. The paper states that, when ice sheets have melted before due to natural forcings, the consequences have been catastrophic. In the post-industrial age, where the melting is greater than during the paleo melts, the science points to even more catastrophic consequences.

Humanity is rapidly extracting and burning fossil fuels without full understanding of the
consequences. Current assessments place emphasis on practical effects such as in-
creasing extremes of heat waves, droughts, heavy rainfall, floods, and encroaching
seas (IPCC, 2014; USNCA, 2014). These assessments and our recent study (Hansen
et al., 2013a) conclude that there is an urgency to slow carbon dioxide (CO2) emis-
sions, because the longevity of the carbon in the climate system (Archer, 2005) and
persistence of the induced warming (Solomon et al., 2010) may lock in unavoidable
highly undesirable consequences. (...)

If the ocean continues to accumulate heat and increase melting of marine-terminating ice shelves of Antarctica and Greenland, a point
will be reached at which it is impossible to avoid large scale ice sheet disintegration
with sea level rise of at least several meters. The economic and social cost of losing
functionality of all coastal cities is practically incalculable.

Large scale ice sheet disintegration with a sea level rise of at least several meters. That means, according to the report, the functional loss of all coastal cities. The report points to unpredictable and sudden melts where the ocean is warming and increased superstorms and sea level rise--with the implication of a threat to civilization itself--as a result.

As there is no doubt politics will try to explain or confuse this report, we are posting the actual abstract and link to the report, which, while scientific, is clear enough to be terrifying.